Twitter Characters and Brand Fiction

@BettyDraper has over 25,000 followers. She tweets about her favorite recipes, and blogs faithfully. But she’s not a real person; she’s a character from TV’s Mad Men .

Helen Klein Ross is the person behind @BettyDraper. She has 20 years of marketing experience and knows how to capture an audience.

As Ross explains, @BettyDraper was part of a campaign launched to keep viewers engaged with the television show Mad Men between seasons. The campaign used Twitter and the blogosphere to draw in potential viewers and to invite fans to help scrape out an online story in a deep and engaging collective narrative project that lies somewhere between fan fiction and marketing.

Ross presents her insights from the campaign in a fascinating series of slides that shows how companies can use collaborative fiction environments similar to ARGs to bring consumers closer to products.

by Mark Wernham. Machine #69 recalls Ryman’s 253, and especially Bob Arellano’s Sunshine ’69 both in its embrace of arbitrary connection and its fond nostalgia for the era when cheap booze, good drugs, fast cars and hot guns seemed to offer everything worth wanting and when nothing was worth wanting very much.

A new hyperromance for the Web. Sparsely linked, La Farge’s new hypertext nods at Stephanie Strickland’s design and to Michael Joyce’s direct address to the reader. but brings a new voice and sensibility to Web fiction.

Multimedia notes from underground, where a traumatized girl furnishes a cozy space in an underground tunnel. Script by Lynda Williams, music and code by Andy Campbell and Matthew Wright. A web work that’s especially nice on the iPad. (The floor lamp is a nice allusion. Get it?)